7

On the far side of the bridge over the Brochty Burn, before the mass of trees that is Vatton forest, there’s a choice of paths as various tramped ways – through the grass and between the broom and gorse bushes – all split and weave and come back together again; I choose one that rides a line of low dunes between the forest proper and the beach, a little undulating highway with views of sand, sea and trees.

I see the figure on the beach from maybe a kilometre away: just a single dark dot, walking slowly, obscured by drifting tendrils of mist, then suddenly glowing in a random shaft of sunlight, briefly radiant before the haze resumes. He or she is wandering along the near-flat beach, their route taking them generally towards anything anomalous: mostly the dark, sand- and wave-smoothed wrecks of trees lying half sunken in the great sable stretches of sand. They’re quite bundled up: wee thin legs and what looks like a heavy jacket. Female? Big kid? There’s something about the way they walk, though, that catches at me. I can’t explain it to myself at first, but I feel an emptiness in my belly, and my heart beats faster.

It might be her, I think. It could be her. She kind of walks like her. No long hair, unless they’re wearing a close-fitting hat. I’m still going up and down this gentle sine-wave of a path, taking the summit route along the line of miniature dunes. I screw my eyes up, trying to see the dark figure better. If I was my dad I’d have a pair of binoculars with me.

I wonder if the iPhone’s up to working like a telescope, and pull it out and try, but in the end the digital zoom is no better than what I can see already.

She’s almost level with me now, maybe a couple of hundred metres away. She’s squatting down in front of a twisted-looking lump of tree, and I can see just enough detail to realise from the way she’s positioned and the general shape of the blob she makes that she’s pointing a biggish camera at the washed-away trunk. She shifts, taking more photos from a variety of angles, all from a squatting position; for a couple she lies right down on the sand.

I’m so busy watching her – it’s definitely a girl, as definitely as you can tell the Bounty Hunter is a girl in the night-time scene in Jabba’s palace in Jedi – that I miss a step and half fall down the sea-face of one of the small dunes, ploughing through sand until my foot catches on some grass and I have to extemporise a jump down onto the sand to avoid going head over heels. Bit of a heavy landing, but nothing damaged. When I look back at the dark figure in the distance she’s standing again, facing me, I think. From the way her arms are set … she’s looking at me through her camera.

I don’t know what else to do, so I smile, make a show of dusting myself down.

She waves. She puts the camera down, the long lens hanging by her side, and I think I hear her shout something. Jeez, is it her?

We start walking towards each other. My heart’s in my mouth. My knees feel weak. Fuck me, what next, am I going to fucking swoon? Just the adrenalin from the near-fall, I tell myself. Pull yourself together, Gilmour.

Definitely a girl. Walks a lot like Ellie: right height, or maybe a little smaller? Was she ever into photography? I don’t recall her being, but that means nothing; in five years Ellie could have been through a dozen new interests, all enthused over, almost mastered – or mistressed – and then dropped for the next challenge. My mode, my expectations, change every few seconds, like the consistency of the sand beneath my feet: now firm, now quaking, uncertain. She’s wearing dark skinny trousers or even thick tights; big, bulky, dark-red hiking jacket. A bunnet on her head like a dark beanie. But it’s getting warm now as the haze thins. Somebody who feels the cold? Pale face.

When I can make out her face, I’m briefly even more confused. It is and isn’t Ellie. If she’d just take that hat off, let me see her hair. Her hair was always spectacular, definitive. Though she might have cut it all off now, for all I know. She stops about fifteen metres away, holds up one hand to stop me and brings the camera up to focus. I stand, realising who she is as she manipulates the big grey lens. It’s one of those lenses that’s so big that when you put the whole caboodle on a tripod you attach the lens to the tripod mount with the camera hanging off it, not the other way round.

‘Hey there, stranger,’ she says.

The voice confirms. It’s Grier. She walks like Ellie and she has similar build to her big sister, though she’s a little less tall. I stand there in that flat wilderness of sand, giving her a closed-mouth smile, crossing my arms, hoping she can’t read my disappointment.

‘Cam on, larve, give us a smoyle,’ she says in a very fair approximation of a certain type of London accent.

I give her a smile. Are we okay? I honestly don’t know. I’ve seen Grier exactly once since the night I had to leave Stonemouth hidden inside a giant yellow oil pipe, riding a freight like some Midwestern hobo, and that one meeting was slightly weird. I’ve had a few also slightly odd emails and texts from her over the years – sparse, sporadic, funny but slightly mad – and I really don’t know where I am with her. The Hey there, stranger sounded amiable enough, but Grier was always a great mimic, always quoting lines from film and TV, and adopting different accents.

She takes her photograph – actually about half a dozen photographs, as the camera click-click-clicks quietly away, for over a second – then puts the camera down, hanging from her right hand. ‘There,’ she says, in her normal voice. ‘Didn’t hurt, did it?’

She’s smiling. I grin properly, not for the camera. I swear her camera arm starts to jerk up towards me, then falls back almost before the motion begins. ‘How you doing, Grier?’

‘How you doin?’ she says in a drawled, Joey voice. She’s walking towards me, covering any awkwardness by checking the screen of the camera, then putting it down again and raising her face to mine as we meet for a big hug, jackets making slidey noises against each other.

I’m getting quite a powerful hug here. I remember how we used to mess around when I was going out with Ellie, and Grier was just a lanky teenager with pancaked-over acne and fierce-looking braces, and so I decide to risk it. I pull her tighter to me and lift her up off her feet – she yelps, just like she used to – and swing her round. I can feel her laughing and I can feel the light pressure of her breasts through the layers of clothing, and – not for the first time – wonder, if things had been different … But, there you are. Heavier than she used to be; I’m twirling a woman now, not a kid. I stop gradually and put her down before we both get too dizzy. She’s still laughing.

I have a sudden thought. ‘Fuck!’ I say, glancing up and down the beach and back towards the forest. ‘Your brothers aren’t here, are they?’

‘No. Just me,’ she says, looking at her camera again. She switches something, pinches a lens cover into place on the big grey lens and hoists the camera over her shoulder. ‘You just walking?’ she asks.

Her face is smooth, flawless. Either no make-up at all, or stuff that’s so artfully applied I can’t see it. Her face is not so much like Ellie’s really, not now; Grier has a thinner, somehow sharper face, when you can see it. She always did have that thing of keeping her head down and looking at you from under her delicately carved brows. She always got called mischievous, too. I guess she still looks it, though there’s also a … a slyness there. Nothing mean, not necessarily, but there’s definitely still a roguish side to the girl that you’d be risking ridicule or worse if you missed. Not a lass to be taken for granted. Just like her sister. And her dad. Like the whole family, in their own sometimes grievous ways.

And the girls definitely got all the looks. Ellie and I were always roughly in sync as we grew up and the changes that made a woman out of the long-limbed girl who first took my breath away just seemed natural, somehow, or at least unexceptional; all the girls in our class and those around us were pupating into these dazzling butterflies back then and Ellie was no different, even if she was the most exotic of them all. Grier was seventeen when I skipped town but still gangly, one of those rare girls who resists maturity instead of trying to adopt it when they’re still twelve. But blossomed now, though, for sure. You can tell, even within the bulky jacket; something of a looker.

There was a rumour a couple of years after I left that she’d become a model, which I just dismissed at the time, or thought had become garbled and really applied to Ellie – Ellie you could always believe would be a model or a film star or something – but looking at the kid sister now, it’s credible. Yeah, well, some lucky man, and all that.

‘Yeah, just walking,’ I tell her, ‘I left the town, just kept on going—’

‘Recent habits die hard,’ she says quietly, with a small affirmative nod, almost before I register what she’s said.

‘—and I suppose I’m sort of heading for the … the main forest car park. Call my folks for a lift if I can get reception.’

‘I’m parked there; I’ll give you a lift.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure,’ she says. Sure I’m sure: that’s a new one. Used to always be posi-tive-ly.

‘Fair enough.’

She slips her arm through mine like it’s the most natural thing in the world and we head diagonally back across the beach, northwest. She walks easily by my side, stride for stride. Her boots look like riding boots, though from the trail of her footsteps we’re retracing, they have serious grips. She’s looking down at the sand, or the trail, seemingly intent.

‘Back for Grandpa Joe’s funeral, huh?’ she asks.

‘Yeah. Special dispensation from your old man.’

She’s silent for a bit. ‘That you done your time, you think?’

‘Doubt it. Saw your dad yesterday.’

‘Brave, foolish: delete as,’ she mutters, not looking at me.

‘He seemed quite happy I’d only be here till Tuesday.’

‘Tuesday,’ she repeats, still intent on the sand or her earlier tracks. A glance. ‘You well?’

‘Yup. You?’

‘Yup.’ I am being impersonated. She steals another glance. ‘Doing okay?’

‘Yup. Still lighting buildings. You?’

‘Still option D.’

‘Option D?’

‘There’s always an option D. Option D: all of the above?’

‘What’s the “all”?’

‘This and that. Stuff. Things.’ I feel her shrug.

‘Could you be a little more vague?’ I ask her, stealing one of Ferg’s lines from last night.

‘Certainly. How vague would you like?’

‘Actually, no; that was about right.’ I pull on her arm. ‘What are you doing these days? Or is it, like, classified?’

‘Sort of a photographer’s assistant, I guess,’ she says, sounding thoughtful. ‘Get in front of the lens now and again.’

‘So you are a model?’

She puts her head back and I can tell she’s rolling her eyes. ‘No,’ she says, extending the word the way a teacher dealing with a slightly dim pupil might. ‘Not as a career; just helping out when needed? You know: like in a porn shoot when the lead man’s not quite up to performing right then and they get the cameraman to do the money shot. That sort of thing.’

‘Whoa! You’re doing that sort of—’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Not that sort of modelling. Though not for the want of offers. Or moral … what do you call them? Scruples?’

‘Scruples.’

‘Screw-pulls, focus pulls,’ she says, toying with the sounds. ‘I’m a trainee photographer; that sound better? And I’ve been in a few videos.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. And not those sort of videos, either. Music, mostly. And I might be interested in films. Like, acting? Depends, though.’ She skips; unforced, just like a five-year-old. ‘Photography thing could work out, but the place to be really is running things: modelling agency, photo agency, casting agency. Thinking about an agency that bridges, like, all those?’ She glances at me again. ‘That’s long term. That’s where I’m aiming to be.’

‘Hey, good for you,’ I tell her, genuinely impressed.

She smiles a big, beautiful smile. Then she looks away. She does another little skip, but it seems lesser this time, half-hearted. She brings her camera round, one-handed, fiddles with it, lets it fall again. ‘You going to see Ellie?’

‘I suppose. Maybe. She’ll be at the funeral, won’t she? She is here?’ I ask, suddenly worried. ‘She’s not abroad or—’

‘She’s here.’

‘Well, we’ll both be at the funeral, I guess. Whether I’ll be allowed to speak to her—’

‘You’re both adults, you know,’ she informs me crisply.

I glance at her. Told off by the kid. Oh well, had to happen.

‘Yeah, but it’s not quite that simple, is it? There’s your dad.’

‘Yeah,’ she breathes. ‘There’s our dad.’ She goes quiet and we walk in silence for a while, the line of low dunes angling closer, the forest dark behind them. A few other people are visible, further north along the beach; dogs race and spring around them. ‘Do you hate him?’ she asks. ‘Dad; my dad, Donnie; do you hate him?’

I blow a breath out. ‘Hate? I don’t know. That’s a … That’s quite a big … I used to get on with him … I’m frightened of him,’ I admit to her. ‘Him and your brothers. I wish what happened hadn’t happened. I wish they didn’t hate me, that’s what I feel, I guess.’ I look at her but she’s not looking back. ‘We’ll never be friends, but I can see he’s got his … point of view. I did something that hurt Ellie and hurt the family, hurt him.’

‘I meant more about him being a gangster.’ She comes almost to a stop, pirouettes while still holding my arm and performs a sort of compact bow. ‘Or crime lord, if you prefer,’ she says primly, falling back into step.

I give a little whistle. The ‘G’ word is one that we tend not to use very much in the Toun. Technically it’s the truth, I suppose, but the way things get run in Stonemouth, between the Murston and the MacAvett families on two sides, and the cops on the other, means there isn’t much in the way of obvious gangster activity; not so as you’d notice, anyway. A pretty stable place, really. Enviably low knife crime, no shootings for years and while drugs are as easy to get here as they are anywhere, they’re better controlled than in most cities or big towns. Harder to buy shit here than almost anywhere else in Britain, if you’re a kid. Of course it means the cops are – again, technically – totally corrupt, but what the hey; peace comes at a price. The system is profoundly fucked up, but it works.

‘There are worse,’ I say, eventually. Though it sounds like a cop-out, in a strange way.

‘You ever hear of a man called Sean McKeddie Sungster?’ Grier asks suddenly.

‘Rings a bell,’ I tell her. ‘Can’t think—’

‘Paedophile. In Dartmoor or Brixham or—’

‘Brixton.’

‘Eh?’ she says, glancing at me. ‘Well, wherever. English prison.’

‘The kiddie-fiddler that lost an earlobe?’

‘Yeah. Everybody’s heard that story.’

‘Why, isn’t it true?’

‘It’s true, far as I know,’ Grier says. ‘Told he can’t ever come back here, not even for his mum or dad’s funeral or anything.’

‘Huh,’ I say. I’m not wanting to pursue any connections with my own case here.

‘And the whole town knows this story?’ she says. ‘And even the people that think Dad’s a disgusting repulsive crook and should be put away for life think that’s a good thing, that’s cool. He did the right thing.’

I shrug. ‘People will tend to think that,’ I offer, feeling lame. ‘I guess.’ (Lamer still.) ‘It’s their kids—’

‘Yeah, but even paedophiles have to live somewhere.’ Grier sounds grim. ‘When he gets out, now he’ll go somewhere nobody knows him at all.’

‘But there’s a register, and—’

She pulls her arm out from mine and steps ahead, turning to face me, her arms crossed as she keeps pace with me, walking backwards. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.’

I hold my hands up. ‘Grier, I’m not.’

She shrugs, looks like she’s about to lift her camera again but then doesn’t. She smiles. God, that’s a pretty face. Then the smile’s gone again. She purses her lips, fiddles with the camera once more. She’s still walking backwards. ‘You want me to fix up a meeting between you and Ellie?’ she asks.

‘What are we? Mafia crime lords?’

She laughs. ‘Yeah, but do you?’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t know about that,’ I tell her. Of course I want to see Ellie, but involving Grier doesn’t seem like so great an idea.

‘I could,’ she tells me. ‘If you want me to.’

I nod, indicating behind her. ‘You’re really confident you’re not just about to fall over a tree trunk, or’ – I lean out to one side, looking around her – ‘a big orange buoy sitting in its own little pool of water?’

Grier is not fooled. ‘Yuss,’ she says, eyelids fluttering, ‘I am, amn’t I?’

I scrunch my face up slowly, knitting my brows, narrowing my eyes and stretching my mouth out tight to either side, as though afraid to watch what is about to happen, but she still doesn’t turn round.

We walk like this for a few more moments. ‘Don’t pretend you’ve memorised every bit of wrecked tree on this beach,’ I tell her.

She shrugs, grins, keeps walking backwards.

‘Seriously,’ I say, glancing round behind her again and using one hand to indicate she should head slightly to the right. ‘You could really hurt yourself if you fell over one of these big ones with the branches or the roots sticking out all over the place.’

She still looks unperturbed, but after a few more paces turns the camera on, takes off the lens cap, rests the lens on her shoulder, pointing behind, and clicks.

‘That’s cheating,’ I tell her as she brings the camera forward to look at the photo she’s just taken.

‘Yup,’ she says. She turns, swings forward, takes my arm again.

‘How is Ellie anyway?’

‘She is okay anyway,’ Grier tells me as we reach the forest car park. She walks up to a BMW X5 and plips it open.

‘This thing your dad’s?’ I ask. It’s a bit bling.

Grier shrugs. ‘Dunno. Family fleet car, kinda.’

Her camera goes into a custom bag with various other lenses and photo paraphernalia. My phone vibrated a minute ago to let me know it’s back online and has texts and missed calls. A text from Dad says ARRANGED YOU CAN GO SEE MIKE MAC THIS AFT. He isn’t really shouting; his texts always come like that. I suppose I’d better go; visiting Don without seeing Mike Mac probably breaks some protocols or something.

Grier takes off her hat, flings it into the back seat and ruffles her hair, which is short and fair and looks natural. I wonder when that happened. This is the first time in a decade I’ve seen her when her hair hasn’t been dyed, or styled to look like Ellie’s. She looks sort of boyish, but good.

Then she looks at me with one of those sudden pause-looks Grier’s been using since she was about thirteen. It’s the sort of look that makes you think, Did I say something wrong? or, Has she just thought of something really disturbing?

‘I’m going to see Grandpa,’ she tells me, ‘want to come?’

‘Urn, where is he?’

‘Geddon’s,’ she says. ‘Lying in state.’

Geddon’s is the oldest funeral company in town. If I’d really thought about it, I’d have guessed his body would be there.

‘Yeah,’ I tell her. ‘Yeah, I’d – okay.’

We bounce and wobble over tree roots to the strip of tarmac through the forest that leads to the main road.

I met Joe when I was walking in the hills, before I got to know the rest of the adult Murstons, before I ever talked to Ellie beyond the odd, grunted, embarrassed hi when our paths crossed, infrequently.

Joe must have been in his seventies then; he was one of those thick-bodied men who’s obviously been fit and hard all his life, and who still has a sort of dense-looking frame even in old age. He was stiff with arthritis and he carried his barrel chest and sizeable belly before him like a backpack worn the wrong way round. He always had an old-fashioned wooden walking stick with him; mostly he used it to poke at interesting things he found lying on the ground, and to thrash at nettles. He said he’d fallen into a load of nettles when he’d been a bairn, and still held a grudge. I don’t know; he might have been joking.

Anyway, he liked to walk his pair of fat, slow, elderly Border collies up in the same hills and forest I tended to wander around in, though the collies kind of just plodded along behind him and never ran about or chased after things. Generally they looked as though they’d much rather be curled up on a rug in front of a fire or in a patch of sunlight in the house.

I was sixteen and I’d recently bought a moped, like just about every boy in my class who could afford to and hadn’t been forbidden by their parents. Scared myself on it a couple of times; never told Mum and Dad. Once I got over the novelty of whirling through the local wee roads and lanes, and making an expedition down the old coast road to Aberdeen, I used it mostly for heading for the hills and then going walking.

I liked hill walking because it got you away from everything and everybody and it was healthier than being on the bike. Other kids in my class were already getting gym memberships for birthdays and Xmas but I thought being out in the open air was less regimented, less controlled. Years later, in London, I held out for nearly two years before I joined a gym, and gave in then purely because it was almost the only way to stay fit without choking on traffic fumes.

I’d just struggled the hard, steep way up to the top of a wee hill in the forests above Easter Pilter when I first bumped into Joe in what must have been the summer of ’01; he’d come up the easy way and was sitting taking the sun with his back against the summit cairn, the two still-panting collies lying flopped round his feet. He wore baggy, worn corduroy trousers somewhere between dark green and brown and an even baggier green jumper with a hole in one elbow. The dogs looked up at me with milky eyes but didn’t raise their heads off their feet.

‘Mornin,’ the old guy said.

‘Aye,’ I said.

Usually I avoided other people in the hills, where I could, without making it obvious. As I had just got to the top of the steep grassand-boulder slope, though, there was nowhere else to go, and anyway I needed to catch my breath. I stood facing away from him, looking at the view. Beyond the treed ridges and tumbled, grassy hills near by, Stonemouth was just visible to the east, the sea a blue-grey presence beyond.

‘Bonny, eh?’ the old guy said.

‘Aye,’ I said. Then I felt I was being too monosyllabic, like some rubbish teenager. ‘Yeah, it is bonny, isn’t it?’

‘You’re a Toun boy, aye?’ he asked.

I turned and looked at him. ‘Aye,’ I said.

‘Accent,’ he said, tapping a large, round and quite red nose. Not that I thought I’d looked surprised or anything.

‘Yourself?’ I asked.

‘Aye. Frae so fur back ah doot yir faither wiz burn.’

From so far back he doubted my father had been born. Joe certainly talked like an old geezer, though, as I learned, he only really put it on like that when he was playing up to some image of age or parochialism he wanted to poke fun at.

I sort of laughed.

‘Ye no stoapin?’ he asked.

‘Urn, no,’ I said. He didn’t look like a weirdo or a paedophile or anything, and even if he was I’d be able to outrun him, but I just felt uncomfortable. ‘Well, better be going,’ I said.

Joe nodded. ‘Wouldne want tae keep ye,’ he said. ‘Mind how ye go, now.’

‘Aye. Nice to meet you,’ I said. Though this wasn’t really true. I walked off, the easy way. I felt vaguely annoyed with myself, though I wasn’t sure why. Awkward meeting.

As I started to head home, I took a forest track a bit too fast on my moped, whacked the sump or something and the bike bled a trickle of oil onto the narrow single-track back to the main road. I found out about the wee trickle of oil when I took a corner – not going fast at all – and the rear wheel just seemed to go out from under the bike. I skidded, tipped onto the tarmac and was scraped across the surface, with the bike pirouetting alongside, until I hit the grass and pine-needle verge and came to a stop. The bike lay ticking beside me, bleeding oil.

I got up, shaking a bit. Ripped my good jeans. Torn my right boot above the ankle. Ripped the stuffing out of my parka. Helmet looked a bit scraped. No blood or broken bones, though. I went for my phone but it had been in a pocket ripped open by my slide along the road. I found it on the grass, but the screen was dead and it wasn’t even powering up.

I was still wondering what to do and how exactly to break this to my mum and dad when an ancient blue Volvo estate came humming along the road. It drew to a stop and it was the same old guy. The two collies, slightly livelier now, were standing panting in the rear, looking at me through their cloudy eyes, moderately interested. The old guy leaned over, wound the window down.

‘Ye have a spill, son, aye?’

‘Aye.’

He shooed the collies to one side and helped me manhandle the bike into the back of the estate. Actually I helped him; he was stronger than me. The collies didn’t appreciate sharing their space with the now dry-sumped bike, but settled down when they realised a few whines and some hangdog looks weren’t going to change matters. The old guy offered his hand as we were about to leave.

‘Joe,’ he said, as we shook.

‘Stewart.’

‘Fine Scoatish name. Whereaboots in the Toun ye wantin?’

‘Ormiston’s Garage, I suppose.’ Not much point taking the bike home. I tried my phone again. Still broken.

‘Here,’ he said, handing me a big, slightly comical-looking mobile as we drove off. ‘You can give them a call.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. It was one of those ultra-basic mobiles made just for old people: big buttons, clearly marked. ‘Mind if I look in your numbers?’

‘Ye no know the number?’

‘No,’ I said. I didn’t want to add the of course not.

Joe tutted, looked amused.

In the end I used directory enquiries.

The bike was a write-off and I wasn’t allowed a new one, not if I wanted to live at home for the next couple of years, before I’d be going to university.

I still had my old mountain bike so I sometimes took that to the nearest forests and hills, though my horizons had definitely shrunk. Joe would ring up some days and offer me a lift to the hills whenever he was heading that way himself. Usually I accepted. He wasn’t always going walking himself, just passing that way, and even when he was taking the dogs for a walk he always encouraged me to head off by myself and just be back at the car by an arranged time.

One day there was only one collie to walk, then, a few months later, none at all. I told him he ought to get new ones, but he said he’d owned too many by now. I didn’t understand, and told him so. He just shrugged and said, ‘Aye, well.’ This was, in retrospect, a lot better than telling me I would understand one day.

Mum and Dad got me a car – a hopelessly underpowered and terribly safe VW Polo – the day I turned seventeen. I passed my test when I was a month older and suddenly I had my freedom again. By then I knew Joe was Joe Murston, father of Donald, and I’d visited the family house on the hill to see him, rather than Callum. It felt more of a duty, to be honest, and the fact that I always stood a chance of bumping into Ellie when I went to see him was a long way from being an irrelevant part of the equation, but I always knew I’d miss him when he went.

I stand in the funeral parlour, looking at him. It’s quiet and cool in here and it smells of lilies: a too-sweet, cloying smell. Old man Murston lies, dressed in a dark, old-fashioned suit, in a flamboyant-looking open casket I suspect he’d have hated. I don’t think I ever saw him wear a tie before. One of those neck things, sometimes; a cravat. His plump face looks like it’s made from shiny plastic and his mouth is wrong: too tight and thin. His body, though still big, looks shrunken somehow, as if the air’s been let out of it.

I’m trying hard to remember some pearls of wisdom Joe might have imparted during our walks together, some deeply meaningful I-think-we’ve-all-learned-something-here-today revelation that I owe to him, but I’m failing.

Mostly we talked about nothing much, or about how it was in the old days: steam trains, having to pay the doctor in the time before the NHS, being able to walk across the river on the decks of trawlers, the war – he was on the farm throughout, producing food for the home front; I got the impression some fun had been had with Land Girls – and nature stuff. Joe taught me a lot of names for trees and birds and animals, but they were the old names, names already slipping from common use, and not really that much help. If a girl said, ‘Is that a cuckoo?’ and you said, ‘Naw, quine, yon’s a gowk,’ you’d generally be looked at aghast, like you were talking a foreign language. Which you kind of were.

Fankle. He taught me a few useful, or at least good words, like fankle. Fankle is more or less a straight synonym of tangle, but it sounds better somehow. Particularly as applied to a fishing line that’s got itself into a terrible, un-sort-outable mess, the level of shambles so extreme all you can really do is take a knife to it and throw it away. That’s a fankle. Applies to lives too, obviously, though the knife approach usually only makes things worse.

It’s just me and Grier in the gently lit back room of the funeral parlour. On the walls are serene paintings of sylvan landscapes, most bathed in the light of golden-red sunsets.

‘How did he die?’ I ask quietly.

‘Heart,’ Grier says.

She goes up to him and runs her fingers through the sandy, wispy hairs on his mostly bald head, patting them into a slightly different arrangement. She uses one finger to press down lightly on the tip of his nose, deforming it slightly before she releases the pressure and it goes back to the way it was.

‘What are you—’

‘Never touched a dead person before,’ she says.

She bends at the waist and quickly kisses him on the forehead. Her dark jacket makes that slidey noise again, quite loud in the insulated silence of the room. I wasn’t sure outdoor jackets were quite the right dress code for such a solemn visit but Grier had pointed out Joe had spent most of his life in baggy country clothes; it used to take weddings and funerals to get him into a suit. He wouldn’t have minded while he was alive, and he couldn’t mind now.

‘You don’t think he’s looking down on us?’ I’d asked.

Grier had looked at me like I’d suggested Sub-Optimus Prime, Mr P’s more rubbish but nicer brother, might fly into the room and grant us superpowers. I don’t believe in life after death or reincarnation or anything like that myself, but I’m still thinking about a lot of that stuff and there was a time when I was always prepared to defer to people who really seemed to have made up their minds about it. I was impressed by their certainty, even when it was obviously bollocks. Especially then; it seemed heroic, somehow. Maybe I’m starting to change, though, because increasingly it’s starting to look just stupid.

‘Think that’s our respects paid, yeah?’ Grier says. She dusts her hands. ‘I’m hungry.’

I watch her attacking an all-day breakfast in Bessel’s Café, a few doors down from the funeral parlour. ‘You don’t eat like a model.’

‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘Actually a lot of them eat like this? They just throw it up again five minutes later.’

She raises an index finger to me and waggles it. Fair enough; I’ve had at least one skinny girlfriend I suspected did that. I’m making do with a coffee and a rowie, the region’s own flattened, salty version of a morning roll, designed to keep for a week on a heaving trawler or something, allegedly.

‘You seen Ellie lately?’ I ask her.

‘Day or two ago,’ she says.

‘Where is she these days? Still in Aberdeen?’

‘Rarely. I think she keeps the flat there but she’s mostly living out at that old Karndine Castle place. The one they converted?’

‘Oh yeah.’

The place had still been a ruin when I’d left; an early-Victorian, nouveau-riche monstrosity ten kilometres out of town that was no more a castle than my mum and dad’s house. I’d heard they’d turned it into apartments.

‘She’s got a terribly posh attic,’ Grier tells me, drawing out ‘terribly’ with a sort of exaggerated English drawl. ‘She’s the princess in the tower now.’ A shrug. ‘Pretty much what she always wanted, I suppose.’ Grier sighs, looks away.

‘Is she okay?’

‘She’s fine, Stewart.’ She sounds exasperated now. ‘You can’t ask her yourself?’

I find myself patting the pocket with my phone in it. ‘She changed her number five years ago. Nobody I could get to talk to me would let me have her new one.’

‘Yeah, well, she’s changed it a couple of more times since,’ Grier says. ‘She tends to do that? Clears her life out like that after any …’

‘Trauma? Major event?’ I suggest.

Grier looks at me dubiously. ‘Something like that.’ She cuts a well-fried egg into pieces, stabs them all in turn and shoves the lot into her mouth, looking cross. ‘Kinda surprised she remembers to keep her own family in each new phone,’ she says, after swallowing. ‘You want her number? Only, you can’t say it was me gave it you.’

‘Think she’d talk to me?’

‘It’d be an unknown number.’

‘I mean, if she knew it was me.’

Grier looks thoughtful, shrugs. ‘Hmm,’ is all she’ll say as she gets serious with the rest of her breakfast.

‘She stopped talking to Callum?’

‘Pretty much. Absolute minimum, like “hello, goodbye” at family things. Defriended big time. Not that she Facebooks. El barely emails.’ Grier stirs her first coffee; I’m on my second.

Bessel’s bustles around us, still popular with Stonemouth’s more refined classes after ninety years. Tall mirrors and polished wooden wall panels with concealed lighting at the top look down on bright buggies, young families and old ladies wearing hats. Bessel’s was bought up by the MacAvetts a few years ago. I think. Unless it was the Murstons. Sometimes it feels like half the properties in town belong to the Murstons or Mike MacAvett. This happened almost accidentally at first, apparently, when Don Murston bought a wee shop on the High Street back in the seventies, so Mrs M could indulge her passion for black-velvet nail pictures and dolls of the world in national dress, and to give her something to do. Then, as more leases and freeholds came up in the Toun, Don realised property was relatively cheap, and a good investment. Mike Mac joined in.

‘But yeah,’ Grier says, ‘Ellie wouldn’t be in the same room as Callum for about a year.’

‘Why was that?’

‘He said something hurtful to her,’ Grier tells me. She’s keeping her voice quite low, though the general conversational hubbub, the clamour of clattering cutlery and the scraping of chair legs on the tiled floor makes it hard to hear anything distinct more than a side plate away.

‘That all? Fuck? Must have been a doozy.’

Grier tips her head. ‘You know all the stuff about Ellie?’ she asks quietly.

I think about this. ‘How would I know if I didn’t?’

Grier rolls her eyes and leans in closer over our tiny table, getting me to do the same. ‘I mean, marrying Ryan.’

‘Of course I knew about that.’ The blindingly obviously destinedto-fail marriage to Mike MacAvett’s younger son that only she and Ryan ever thought was a good idea, and maybe not even both of them.

‘The miscarriage?’

I nod slowly. ‘I heard a rumour.’

‘Then divorcing Ryan.’

‘Know of.’

‘Then going back to Aberdeen, to university?’

‘I heard she could still have gone to Oxford.’

‘Yeah, well, we all heard that,’ Grier says. ‘But, leaving at the end of second year?’

‘Oh.’

‘Didn’t graduate. Again. Started a different course; gave that up too.’

‘Didn’t know that.’

Grier sits further forward, her nose only ten centimetres from mine. ‘Big family gathering at the house? Murdo and Fi’s daughter, Courtney, her christening party? Callum was drunk; Ellie was holding the baby at the time, making all the usual cooing noises you have to make.’ Grier stops, nods as though she’s just told me something conclusive, sits back, looks round, then lowers her head to mine again. ‘You really can’t tell anyone I told you this?’

‘Promise.’

‘People were talking about the kid’s future, how it’d cost a fortune if she had to go to university. Then somebody mentioned Ellie, like, in this context? And Callum said, Yeah, well, Ellie never could finish anything she started.’

It takes me a second. Then I take a breath in suddenly. ‘Shit, you mean, like, the baby she lost, not just the … the degree and not graduating?’

Grier hoists one fair eyebrow. ‘Middle name Sherlock. But, yeah; that was what Ellie thought he meant. She was … kind of upset.’

‘You think he did mean it that way, though?’

‘Hard to know with Callum,’ Grier says, thoughtfully. ‘He was stupid enough to say it without realising how she’d take it, but, yeah, he was vicious enough towards her sometimes. Might have thought it through first and meant it.’ She taps the foam from her coffee spoon and raises the cup to her lips. ‘And he was impressed enough with himself, after a few drinks anyway, to think he was being incredibly witty.’

‘Fuck,’ I breathe.

Grier drains her cup. Her little pink tongue flickers, removing foam from her lips. ‘El stormed out. Callum was even more upset,’ Grier says, then looks meditatively towards the high ceiling. ‘Or pretended to be.’ She shrugs. ‘Anyway, Ellie wouldn’t talk to him for a year; wouldn’t even visit the house if she knew he was there or going to turn up.’ Grier stirs the foam in her cup with one finger, sucks the finger. She nods. ‘There you go: that was one of the times she changed her phone.’

‘Jesus,’ I say, lost for anything beyond expressions of shock.

‘Well, that was Callum,’ Grier says, studying her coffee spoon. ‘Mostly he always found it hard to articulate what he felt? But on the rare occasions he did, it was usually something really hurtful.’ She smiles at me.

‘Ahm,’ I say, as she keeps looking at me. ‘Still, I was … I was sorry to hear he …’

‘Fell or was pushed off the bridge?’ she provides.

I must be staring at her. She flaps one hand. ‘Nah; he jumped.’ She sits back. ‘But if you’re telling the truth about being sorry to hear about it, you’re part of a small minority.’ She tips her head. ‘Close your mouth and stop looking so shocked, Stewart. Jesus, have you forgotten what my surname is?’ Without moving her head she flicks her gaze from side to side, sits a little closer and says, ‘How many people in this place have been stealing glances at me, knowing whose daughter I am?’

I clear my throat. ‘It’s mostly men,’ I tell her. Though she’s right. ‘And the reason they’re looking at you has got nothing to do with your father.’

She just laughs.

I remember the preserved four-wheel drive, the giant portrait in the hall of the Murston family home. ‘Your dad misses Callum,’ I tell her.

‘That’s compensation, or a guilty conscience,’ Grier says, quietly. There’s a pause. She shrugs. ‘They fought a lot, just before he hurdled the railings.’

‘Shit,’ I say, because I have no idea what else might cover all the implications here.

‘Oh, he doted on the boy.’ Grier sighs. ‘That’s the way it is in our family. All or nothing. Ellie got all the looks, Murdo got all the … expectation, ruthlessness? Fraser got all the viciousness. Well, most of it. Norrie got all the stuff that was left. Resentment, mostly. And Callum got all the forgiveness. The more stupid things he did, the more Don forgave him.’ Another shrug. ‘Actually Ellie got all the smarts as well. Just maybe not all the application. Think Don still feels she’d be the best one to succeed him, if she could be bothered, which she’s not.’ Grier shifts in her seat. ‘Can we talk about something else besides my … clan now? I’m bored.’

‘What did you get?’

‘What did I get?’

‘What did you get all of?’

‘All the boredom,’ she says, in a flat voice, eyelids hooded. ‘I just said.’

‘I think you got all the modesty,’ I tell her, grinning at her. ‘All the self-deprecation.’

‘Years of indoctrination,’ she says dismissively. ‘I’ve been groomed for failure. Don keeps the tape of Callum jumping, did you know that?’

‘What?’

‘From the bridge CCTV, night Cal took the plunge. Plays it back when he’s drunk and – what’s that word? Maudlin.’

‘Fuck. That is deeply weird.’

‘Not saying he gets off on it, Stu. Just plays it.’

‘Still a bit weird.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Grier says, before switching to a cutesy little-girl voice: ‘Gotta love my fambly.’ Her voice goes back to normal as she mutters, ‘Kind of compulsory.’ She picks up the bill, frowns at it. ‘You paying or me?’

‘So. Some icing on the cake?’ she asks as we walk back to the car.

‘What?’

‘Coke?’ she says, tapping the side of her nose. Grier hasn’t put her arm through mine since we’ve been in town, I notice. That would be a bit strange, I guess. ‘Can’t invite you to the house, but there’s a great place up by Stoun Point. Down a lane. Room for only one car. You can park looking out to sea and the whin’s so close people can’t even squeeze past.’

‘Ah,’ I say, tempted. I know the spot, above Yarlscliff; Ellie and I took my wee car up there a few times. ‘Hmm. Better not,’ I tell her. Wouldn’t do to visit Mike Mac off one’s tits. And then, that place Grier’s talking about: it’s kind of hallowed turf. Kind of hallowed turf for me and Ellie the way it’s kind of hallowed turf for half the people in Stonemouth between seventeen and thirty, but all the same. It’d be weird going there with Grier for anything illicit.

An ignoble part of my brain has always had this slightly unscrupulous idea that boils down to If not Ellie, Grier would do, but another, sensible, part of me knows this would be insane. Probably unwelcome (though possibly not) and certainly even more likely to risk further upsetting the already fairly upset Murston clan. Also, Grier’s just dangerous, somehow. She’d be nitro in a cement mixer if her dad was a sandal-wearing social worker, never mind the region’s principal crime lord.

‘Your loss,’ she tells me. ‘It’s good shit.’

‘Some other time.’

‘Might not be such good shit, then,’ she says briskly. ‘Opportunities pass.’

We’re in the Central Car Park, where the old railway station used to be. She stops, comes right up to me and jabs me in the chest with one finger. ‘Again, no gossiping, yeah? Swore to Dad I’d never do drugs.’ She grins widely. ‘Hilariously hypocritical, eh?’

‘Hilarious,’ I agree.

My phone goes and I let her get into the car while I answer. It’s Mike Mac, telling me he’s busy through to five; see me then? So I’ve got time to kill this afternoon. Another karmic nudge? Maybe I ought to go do a few lines with Grier. She’s watching me through the glass, tapping her fingers theatrically on the steering wheel. The engine’s already running.

I look through those earlier texts. One from BB suggesting a game of snooker at Regal Tables, just a couple of minutes’ walk away on the High Street. I hold a wait-a-moment finger up to Grier, who raises then drops her shoulders dramatically, and throws herself back in her seat. I call BB.

‘Stu?’

‘You at the Regal?’

‘Aye. Playing with maself here, man; it’s shite. You comin, like?’

‘There in five.’

‘Pint?’

‘Just the auto-e for me.’

‘Shagger Landy it is.’

I open the X5’s passenger door. ‘Stuff to do,’ I tell Grier. ‘Laters?’

‘Funeral, if not before,’ Grier says, looking unimpressed. ‘Call.’